Abstract
This article examines the meaning of literature in the life and work of Guy Debord through an analysis of his reading notes. Specifically, the article considers those reading notes collected under the dossier "Poésie etc." held in the Guy Debord archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and published for the first time in 2019. The article proposes that we can best grasp the nature of the relationship between Debord and literature through the Situationist practice of détournement, that is, the transformation of existing cultural products to give them new meaning. Debord, in the construction of this collection, is, in this sense, giving new meaning to existing literary material through the creation of a body of cultural fragments that together express a poetic subjective identification based in the lived experience of a revolutionary project. This insight informs an analysis of Debord's reading notes contained within this collection that concern the manifestos and journals of the Surrealists that help us to understand the centrality of the relationship between the Situationsts and the legacy of Surrealism.
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